Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Poetic Virtue and the Method of Equality

Abstract

Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster confronts its reader with an intellectual adventure. In this article, Michael McCreary interrogates why Rancière might have chosen to share Joseph Jacotot's pedagogical ideas with us and how the method in which he casts them might be internal to their teaching. In the first section, McCreary directs his attention to the end of the book, where Rancière chronicles the ways in which Jacotot's educational vision proved difficult to share with his nineteenth-century contemporaries — both his critics and his supposed disciples. In the second, he suggests that recent interpretations of The Ignorant Schoolmaster by philosophers of education have, in their turn, tended to miss the adventure of Rancière's text in uncannily similar ways. In the third and final section, he returns to the question of what we stand to learn from Jacotot's story by considering how Rancière's text teaches us to read it. To do so McCreary looks at the pedagogical role of literary texts within Jacotot's teaching: Jacotot situates reading these texts as an act of “translation” by which one human intelligence makes itself known to another on the basis of their fundamental equality. McCreary concludes by suggesting some potential avenues for verifying the intelligence of The Ignorant Schoolmaster in a way that does not reduce the imaginative process of verification to a standardized pedagogical model.